Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, &c./Part 4/Cuck Stool or Ducking Stool

THE CUCK-STOOL OR DUCKING-STOOL.

As recently as the beginning of the eighteenth century this machine for the punishment of scolds was in use in the parish and town of Liverpool. It was a chair suspended by a long pole over some pool of water; and the scolding woman being tied fast in the chair, could be ducked more or less deeply in the pond, as those on its bank raised their end of the pole. It is, says Baines, impossible now to fix the date when the chair of correction was first introduced into Liverpool, or to say when, by the improvement in female manners, it was no longer found to be necessary; but that it was in request as late as the year 1695 may be inferred from an item in the parochial expenditure of that year, which runs thus:—"Paid Edward Accres for mending the cuck-stool, fifteen shillings." For many ages the ducking-stool stood at the south end of the town of Ormskirk; but from the improvement in female manners, or the refinement in modern taste, it was removed in 1780. According to Blount, this cooling apparatus was in use in the Saxon era, when it was named the scealfing-stole, and described to be a chair in which quarrelsome women were placed, and plunged under water. The poet Gay celebrates this correctional chair, which was evidently in use in his time, in the following terms (Pastorals, iii. v. 105):—

"I'll speed me to the pond where the high stool
On the long plank hangs o'er the muddy pool—
That stool the dread of every scolding quean."

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